Why am I so fascinated by denial? And is denial as important as I make out? In a world which offers both good and bad, why is that I hark on this subject and wish it were less important to me. I realise maybe that denial has so many powerful influences upon our world. It is to an extent the bridge between what we imagine life might be and the reality of life.

I don’t feel we intend to be denial seekers or denial supporters in my outlook. I simply accept denial is a very useful practical process to help us cope with unacceptable truth.

We are not as strong in mind as we might wish. Our whole development takes account of what we are and what we can do in our living. We live to live, and mostly we live to love. Love is the key to living. This may sound to some quite sentimental, for Love opens our inner being to vulnerable feelings. And maybe it is our sensitivity to our living that makes us strong and fearful all in one.

When life is easy, we don’t feel shocks or hard knocks. In most peoples lives, the number of catastrophes are far outweighed by good times, yet we have a problem. When we do get hard knocks and they are infrequent we are not developed or able to cope well simply because they are out of the ordinary. We don’t deal well with things which are infrequent, and we might marvel at the resilience of others who seem more able to deal with harsh times. People who have hard lives are used to hard living, and make living as best they can. They have skills to deal with what we find difficult and we find unacceptable in our experience.

And one persons hard times is another’s easy street. Take a desert veteran and they thrive in the desert, put them in a city and they feel out of their depth and their hard living skills are useless to them. The same applies to us in Cities, we find them easy day to day, put us in a desert and we find that impossible and our life expectancy goes down dramatically.

When we face denials of our living, we do not like what we experience, we wish it different and better and to our liking and not as we find. When we face big things like death and endings our ability to accept these changes is as hard and long sometimes as the love we gave and have lost.

We hear screams from the stoic to get a grip and get on, we hear put downs as we struggle to cope with our loss. We are not so good at expressing our feelings as vulnerable we are to others disdain. And worse is the loss of love we feel. Loss of living and familiar in live and not receiving love from those we adored can cripple the most possessed people we know.

We don’t like what we feel might be weakness in us. And men like me don’t show their deeper feelings, yet we do and we like sharing our joy. In sadness though where we bereft we express much more inside than out and may cover our feelings for we are supposed to be strong.

What gets in the way is how we project and what is expected of stronger human beings, we give ourselves more than we can cope with as we hide away from the realities we face.

Denial, that we are less than in some respect. Weaker we find our minds cannot cope and we gloss over feelings we push down inside. Real people find solace in grieving their way, and coming to acceptance of anything and everything they may.

And we can have the most profound understanding of grief and its character and we can be as equipped as the world can make us, there is some we forget in our intellectual study, that we are different and react as we will. Our reaction is as good as we understand our denial, and we understand denial as well as we can. It never makes much difference to how we experience our feelings this knowing and thinking makes feeling not different.

Our feelings they grow as long as we experience them, when those feelings are cut off as often we find, there is a gap so deep and wide as it can be, a gulf in our living we cannot replace.

The gulf of loss is as big as our time worked in loving others we know in our lives. Loss hurts and freezes our insides out, makes us angry and depressed and many hard feelings are rolling around as we try to come to terms with our grief

Experts, psychologists and psychiatrists, wise old men, wise old women, wise young people share what it is, this grief so deep our hearts might break. And we get to understand what living really means when we hit rock bottoms in living our lives.

Losing others can break our human spirit, for our love runs so deep we cannot imagine being without them. We imagine them still in our memories. And we keep hoping without really knowing that we can change what we know is true.

We feel our losses forever once experienced, and their powerful play inside us keeps memories alive. We cannot replace our feelings and loss. Their impact greatest as the events take place, the memories fade as we get on with life. Yet some losses hurt forever inside.

We try as we might to forget and move on. Others encourage us to let go, we will do our best, yet inside we all know, our feelings are hurt and often beyond repair. We can have feelings their impact as profound, yet we never forget those so deep and the wounds to our spirit inside.

Denial, keeps our living alive, and stops us from ending our own short time. We might feel so grief stricken we cannot move on and some never do, just live on and on.

If it were just that denial affords time to recover our senses and get on with life, we might be less affected than most of us are, yet denial creeps in to all of our lives.

We can reject much of what is real, for we don’t want it to be, and we can reject our behaviour which tolerates bad events. We can broker our reality so we can live on and pretend all is right when we know its quite wrong.

I know in the past when lovers have cheated, yet I gave them the time to make good their confession and in that denial of my less than significance, accepted maltreatment for all as long as I might. Is the hardest of living to face the reality, of those who might love us and find they do not. We hope with imagination and wishes and dreams that love is still with us, when we know it has gone. Indeed we might wonder if ever we were loved when a partner strays away.

We learn to cover up and deal with the outcome, we still keep our denial as we don’t rock the boat, we go with our hopes as we imagine a better future and find we most often are left high and dry.

Worse still in denial we learn the same treatment for those we find attractive an we entice into our lives. For when we are rejected, we find on the rebound we behave as others have, so we get our needs met. Yet we don’t for we know when we delude inside ourselves, we are deluding everyone we encounter with damage we have.

Mad times infects us as quickly as we deny the reality of our treatment by others and how we might compensate to fill our loss. The madness we get when we find in our grief to replace love lost with others as we can. We take and we use and we squander our feelings, and cheat others of theirs as we try to recover.

Once we realise as might we are doing to get over, we may understand how we cope with the damage of life.

Our denial makes us weaker as we assert our innocence, for we cannot be blamed for our bad behaviour. We get to a place where we blame all and sundry, we never accept our part until we realise our humanity.

For certainly anyone who faces great loss, wants to find love again as quickly as possible we can. And we make great mistakes in finding more love, when our healing from sorrow is as great as can be. We use others and anything without realising, our denial profound, we cannot reason and our feelings are hurting. It goes round and round.

We are rebounding and love is as hard to find, as our grief keeps us spinning and playing around. We cannot believe life and reality, we make up our world, where the gaps are the greatest, we put patches of dreams. And dreams fade fast as they can never match our living and love we experienced and gone forever.

Madness and insanity, they patch our world up, most of us escape back to reality eventually we all hope. And some of us get caught in destructive oblivion and seek nothing more than to blot it all out. And others keep on spinning as if their world is fine, for they ever deal with broken parts inside.

And humans can understand all these states of living as we gain our experience of being around. We cannot make the difference from an outside perspective, to help others process their feelings inside. Time helps, time heals if we live that long. And sometimes nothing heals whatever is done.

Denial so important to can keep us living through the horrors of life as we try to muddle through. Our human qualities we revere so well, can kills as soundly as a gunshot from hell.

No wonder I hang to denial when life is hard, but just enough to memorialise my journey, for reality if we ever find our way, is preferable with doubt to dreams we might make our world.

Cloud Cuckoo Land, as many have found, helps get us over the worst of living we loss is profound. And when we return from madness to now, and get on with living, we start over again. As hard as life can be, we cannot replace and cover up our grief. Grief makes more room in our day to day life, to find our own love and love of others we know. And find new love if we have resources inside, or just get on with living with great hole inside.

We never know the impact we will feel, until its our turn to experience life for real. We never know we don’t know how we might cope.

And don’t forget, for many denial, their only hope…

Hello darkness my old friend,

The sound of silence…